"If it can look at a picture, explain what’s in it, and hypothesize about physics inside the picture’s environment, is it “just pattern matching”?"

That's extrapolation via approximation. Computers synthesize a specification. The difference is nuanced and entirely contextual.

Those are way too broad terms for this conversation to go anywhere. The point is, what's to say the LLM is not doing "extrapolation via approximation" or some process that is analog to how we think? We barely understand how the brain works to start with.